The Painter of Battles

by: Arturo Perez-Reverte; translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

Published by: Random House

Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart

War photographer–and war weary–Andres Faulques had laid his camera aside and picked up his paintbrush in Arturo Perez-Reverte’s new novel, The Painter of Battles.

Faulques has retired to a tower on the Spanish coast where he is painting a mural of all the battles he has seen both through his camera lens and on the canvases of the great masters. He lives a quiet life, painting by day, remembering by night. Some of the works are quite disturbing, showing the bloody thighs of a raped woman and an erupting, massive volcano erupting.

His only visitor is a man whom he made infamous with one of his photographs years ago. Now the stranger, the Croatian, Markovic, has showed up at Faulques’ door with a simple message: “I’m here to kill you.”

Faulques seems disturbed at first, then the two engage in conversations about love, art, war, and revenge. They also discuss the woman Olvido Ferrara whom Faulques photographed on the side of a road after her death. After the two met in a Mexican museum, the couple, now lovers, traveled the world. Faulques photographed the war while Olvido photographed things–like buildings, a shoe on the side of the road.

The narrative moves slowly over the course of a week. There were two major faults with Perez-Reverte’s tale. First is that if the reader is not knowledgeable about war art, many of the painters (I recognized only a few of the artists and none of the works) and paintings symbolism and meaning will be lost. Second, was the infuriating referral to Faulques as “the painter of battles” instead of his name.

The saving grace of The Painter of Battles, and the thing that kept me reading, was that it has some beautiful prose. Unfortunately, the luscious, wonderful prose did not add up to a great story.

Armchair Interviews agrees.